Night and Fear

I

He saw Vilma first. She was the dark one. Then he saw Gilda. She was the golden one. He didn’t see the man at all, that first night. He didn’t know any of their names. He didn’t want to. He’d just gone to a show on his night off.

He had an aisle seat, alongside the runway. He’d told the ticket seller he wanted to see more than just their baby-blue eyes. The ticket seller had said, “You will.” He’d been right, it turned out.

It was, of course, simply burlesque under a different name, to evade the licensing restrictions of the last few years. But at the moment Benson took his seat, there wasn’t anything going on that a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl couldn’t have watched with perfect propriety. A black-haired singer in a flowing, full-length dress was rendering Mighty Lak a Rose. And she was good, too.

But this was his night off and he felt kind of cheated. “Did I walk in on a funeral?” he asked himself. He shouldn’t have asked that, maybe. The mocking little gods of circumstances were only too willing to arrange it for him.

The singer walked off, the orchestra gave out with an introductory flourish, and the proceedings snapped back into character. The curtains parted to reveal a “living statue” group — five or six nymphs enameled a chalky white, their torsos veiled by wisps of cheesecloth, presided over by a central “statue” poised on a pedestal in their midst. This was Gilda, the main attraction.

Gilda stood there, head thrown back, seemingly in the act of nibbling at a dangling cluster of grapes. Whether she was as innocent of vesture as she seemed was beside the point; her body was coated with a thick layer of scintillant golden paint which was certainly far more protective than any ordinary clothes would have been. But that didn’t dampen the general enthusiasm any. It was just the principle of the thing that mattered. Good clean fun, so to speak. She got a tremendous hand without doing a thing — just for art’s sake.

The curtains coyly came together again, veiling the tableau. There was a teasing pause, maintained just long enough to whet the audience’s appetite for more, then they parted once more and the “statuary” had assumed a different position. Gilda was now shading her eyes with one hand, one leg poised behind her, and staring yearningly toward the horizon — or more strictly speaking, a fire door at the side of the auditorium.

Benson caught the spirit of the thing along with everyone else and whacked his hands. The curtains met, parted once more, and again the tableau had altered. This time Gilda was up on tiptoes on her pedestal, her body arched over as though she was looking at her own reflection in a pool.

Just before the curtains obliterated her, Benson thought he saw her waver a little, as if having difficulty maintaining her balance. Or maybe it was simply faulty timing. She had prepared to change positions a little too soon, before the curtains entirely concealed her from view. That slight flaw didn’t discourage the applause any. It had reached the pitch of a bombardment. The audience wasn’t a critical one; it didn’t care about complete muscular control as long as it got complete undress. Or the illusion of it, through gold-plating.

The pause was a little longer this time, as though there had been a slight hitch. Benson wondered where the dancing came in. They had billed her out front as “The Golden Dancer,” he remembered, and he wanted his money’s worth. He didn’t have long to wait. The footlights along the runway, unused until now, gushed up, the curtains parted, and Gilda was down on the stage floor now, and in motion.

She was coming out on the runway to dance over their heads. For this additional intimacy, she had provided herself with a protective mantle of gauzy black — just in case some of the Commissioner’s men happened to be in the audience.

She wasn’t any great shakes as a dancer; nobody expected her to be, nobody cared. It was mostly a matter of waving her arms, turning this way and that, and flourishing the mantle around her, a little bit like a bullfighter does his cape. She managed, while continually promising revealing gaps in it, to keep it all around her at all times, in a sort of black haze, like smoke. It was simply the striptease in a newer variation.

But indifferent as her dancing ability was to begin with, a noticeable hesitation began to creep into its posturing after she had been on the runway a few moments. She seemed to keep forgetting what to do next.

“They hardly have time to rehearse at all,” Benson thought leniently.

Her motions had slowed down like a clock that needs winding. He saw her cast a look over her shoulders at the unoccupied main stage, as if in search of help. The lesser nymphs hadn’t come out with her this last time, were probably doing a quick change for the next number.

For a moment she stood there perfectly still, no longer moving a muscle. The swirling black gauze deflated about her, fell limp. Benson’s grin of approval dimmed and died while he craned his neck up at her. Suddenly she started to go off balance.

He had only had time to throw up his arms instinctively, half to ward her off, half to catch her and break her fall. Her looming body blurred the runway lights for an instant, and then she had landed across him, one foot still up there on the runway behind her. The black stuff of her mantle came down after her, like a parachute, and half-smothered him. He had to claw at it to free his head, get rid of it.

Those in the rows farther back, who hadn’t been close enough to notice the break in her performance that had come just before the fall, started to applaud and even laugh. They seemed to think it was still part of her routine, or that she had actually missed her footing and tumbled down on him, and either way it struck them as the funniest thing they had ever seen.

Benson already knew better, by the inert way her head and shoulders lay across his knees. “Take it easy. I’ve got you,” he whispered reassuringly, trying to hold her as she started to slide to the floor between the rows of seats.

Her eyes rolled unseeingly up at him, showing all whites, but some memory of where she was and what she had been doing still Angered in the darkness rolling over her.

“I’m so sorry. Did I hurt you, mister?” she breathed. “Guess I’ve spoiled the show—” It ended with a long-drawn sigh — and she was still.

The laughter and handclapping was dying down, because her head didn’t bob up again at the place where she had disappeared from view, and they were catching on that something was wrong. A hairy-armed man in rolled blue shirt-sleeves popped partly out of the wings, not caring if he was seen or not, and wigwagged frantically to the band leader, then jumped back again where he’d come from. The droopy music they’d been playing for her broke off short and a rackety rumba took its place. A long line of chorus girls came spilling out on the stage, most of them out of step and desperately working to get their shoulder straps adjusted.

Benson was already struggling tip the aisle with his inert golden burden. A couple of ushers came hustling down to help him, but he elbowed them aside. “You quiet the house down. I can get her back there by myself.”

A man with a cigar sticking flat out of his mouth like a tusk met him at the back, threw open a door marked Manager. “Bring her in here to my office, until I can send for a doctor—” Before closing it after the three of them, he stopped to scan the subsiding ripples of excitement in the audience. “How they taking it? All right, keep ’em down in their seats, usher. No refunds, understand?” He closed the door and came in.

Benson had to put her in the manager’s swivel chair; there wasn’t even a couch or sofa in the place. Even with the shaded desk light on, the place stayed dim and shadowy. Her body gleamed weirdly in the gloom, like a shiny mermaid.

“Thanks a lot, bud,” the manager said to him crisply. “You don’t have to wait; the doctor’ll be here in a minute—”

“The tin says stick around.” Benson reburied the badge in his pocket.

The manager widened his eyes. “That’s a hot one. You’re probably the only headquarters man out there tonight, and she keels over into your lap.”

“That’s the kind of luck I always have,” Benson said, bending over the girl. “I can’t even see a show once a year, without my job horning in.”

The manager took another squint outside the door to see how his house was getting along. “Forgotten all about it already,” he reported contentedly. He turned back. “How’s she coming?”

“She’s dead,” Benson said muffledly, from below one arm, ear to the girl’s gold brassiere.

The manager gave a sharp intake of breath, but his reaction was a purely professional one. “Gee, who’ll I get to fill in for her on such short notice? What the hell happened to her? She was all right at the matinee!”

“What’d you expect her to do,” Benson said short-temperedly, “come and inform you she was going to die in the middle of her act tonight, so you’d have time to get a substitute?” He lifted one of the golden eyelids to try for optical reflex; there wasn’t any.

The hastily summoned doctor had paused outside the door, trying to take in as much of the show free as he could before he had to attend to business. He came in still looking fascinatedly behind him. “You’re too late,” the manager scowled. “This headquarters man says she’s dead already.”

Benson was on the desk phone by now with his back to the two of them. A big belly-laugh rolled in from outside before they could get the door closed, and drowned out what he was saying. He covered the mouthpiece until he could go ahead. “Forty-second Street, just off Broadway. Okay.” He hung up. “The examiner’s office is sending a man over. We’ll hear what he says.”

The doctor smiled. “Well, he can’t say any more than I can. She’s dead and that’s that.”

“He can say why,” Benson countered, dipping four fingers of each hand into his coat pockets and wiggling his thumbs.

The private doctor closed the door after him.

“Now he’s going to stand and chisel the rest of the show free, just because he was called in,” the manager predicted sourly.

“He can have my seat,” Benson remarked. “I won’t be using it any more tonight.”

He brushed a fleck of gold paint off the front of his coat, then another off the cuff of his coat sleeve. “Let’s get the arithmetic down.” He took out a black notebook, poised a worn-down pencil stub over the topmost ruled line of a blank page. The pages that had gone before — and many had gone before — were all closely scrawled over with names, addresses, and other data. Then, one by one, wavy downward lines were scored through them. That meant: case closed.

The manager opened a drawer in his desk, took out a ledger, sought a pertinent page, traced a sausage-like thumb down a list of payroll names. “Here she is. Real name, Annie Willis. ‘Gilda’ was just her—”

Benson jotted. “I know.”

He gave the address on West 135th. “There’s a phone number to go with it, too.”

Benson jotted. He looked up, said, “Oh, hello, Jacobson,” as the man from the examiner’s office came in, went back to his note-taking again.

Outside, 300-odd people sat watching a line-up of girls dance. Inside, the business of documenting a human death went on, with low-voiced diligence.

Benson repeated: “Nearest of kin, Frank Willis, husband—”

The examining assistant groused softly to himself: “I can’t get anything out of it at all, especially through all this gilt. It mighta been a heart attack; it mighta been acute indigestion. All I can give you for sure, until we get downtown, is she’s dead, good and dead—”

The manager was getting peevish at this protracted invasion of his privacy. “That makes three times she’s been dead, already. I’m willing to believe it, if no one else is.”

Benson murmured, “This is the part I hate worst,” and began to dial with his pencil stub.

An usher sidled in, asked: “What’ll we do about the marquee, boss? She’s still up on it, and it’s gotta be changed now for tomorrow’s matinee.”

“Just take down the ‘G’ from ‘Gilda’, see? Then stick in an ‘H’ instead, make it ‘Hilda.’ That saves the trouble of changing the whole—”

“But who’s Hilda, boss?”

“I don’t know myself! If the customers don’t see anyone called Hilda, that’ll teach them not to believe in signs!”

Benson was saying quietly: “Is this Frank Willis? Are you the husband of Annie Willis, working at the New Rotterdam Theater?... All right, now take it easy. She died during the performance this evening... Yeah, onstage about half an hour ago... No, you won’t find her here by the time you get down. You’ll be notified when the body’s released by the medical examiner’s office. They want to perform an autopsy... Now don’t get frightened, that’s just a matter of form, they always do that. It just means an examination... You can claim her at the city morgue when they’re through with her.”

He hung up, murmured under his breath: “Funny how a strange word they don’t understand, like ‘autopsy,’ always throws a scare into them when they first hear it.” He eyed the manager’s swivel chair. It was empty now, except for a swath of gold-paint flecks down the middle of the back, like a sunset reflection. He grimaced discontentedly. “I shoulda stayed home tonight altogether. Then somebody else would have had to handle the blamed thing! Never saw it to fail yet. Every time I try to see a show—”

II

Next day at eleven a cop handed Benson a typewritten autopsy report.

Benson didn’t place the name for a minute. Then: “Oh yeah, that girl in the show last night — Gilda.” He glanced down at his own form with rueful recollection. “It’s going to cost me two bucks to have the front of that other suit dry-cleaned. Okay, thanks. I’ll take it into the lieutenant.”

He scanned it cursorily himself first, before doing so. Then he stopped short, frowned, went back and read one or two of the passages more carefully.

“...Death caused by sealing of the pores over nearly the entire body surface for a protracted period. This substance is deleterious when kept on for longer than an hour or two at the most. It is composed of infinitesimal particles of gold leaf which adhere to the pores, blocking them. This produces a form of bodily suffocation, as fatal in the end, if less immediate than stoppage of the breathing passage. The symptoms are delayed, then strike with cumulative suddenness, resulting in weakness, dizziness, collapse, and finally death. Otherwise the subject was perfectly sound organically in every way. There can be no doubt that this application of theatrical pigment and failure to remove it in time was the sole cause of mortality—”

He tapped a couple of nails on the desk undecidedly a minute or two. Finally he picked up the phone and got the manager of the New Rotterdam Theater. He hadn’t come in yet, but they switched the call to his home. “This is Benson, headquarters man that was in your office last night. How long had this Gilda — Annie Willis, you know — been doing this gilt act?”

“Oh, quite some time — five or six months now.”

“Then she wasn’t green at it; she wasn’t just breaking it in.”

“No, no, she was an old hand at it.”

He hung up, tapped his nails some more. “Funny she didn’t know enough by this time to take it off before it had a chance to smother her,” he murmured half under his breath. The report should have gone into his lieutenant, and that should have ended it. Accidental death due to carelessness, that was all. She’d been too lazy or too rushed to remove the harmful substance between shows, and had paid the penalty.

But a good detective is five-sixths hard work and one-sixth blind, spontaneous “hunches.” Benson wasn’t a bad detective. And his one-sixth had come uppermost just then. He folded the examiner’s report, put it in his pocket, and didn’t take it into his lieutenant. He went back to the New Rotterdam Theater on 42nd Street, instead.

It was open even this early, although the stage show didn’t go on yet. A handful of sidewalk beachcombers were drifting in, to get in out of the sun. The manager had evidently thought better of his marquee shortchange of the night before. The canopy still misleadingly proclaimed “Gilda, the Golden Dancer,” but below it there was now affixed a small placard, so tiny it was invisible unless you got up on a ladder to scan it: “Next Week.”

The manager acted anything but glad to see him back so soon. “I knew that wasn’t the end of it! With you fellows these things go on forever. Listen, she keeled over in front of everybody in the theater. People are dropping dead on the streets like that every minute of the day, here, there, everywhere. What’s there to find out about? Something gave out inside. It was her time to go, and there you are.”

Benson wasn’t an argumentative sort of person. “Sure,” he agreed unruffledly. “And now it’s my time to come nosing around about it — and there you are. Who shared her dressing room with her — or did she have one to herself?”

The manager shrugged disdainfully. “These aren’t the days when the Ziegfeld Follies played this house. She split it with Vilma Lyons — that’s the show’s ballad singer, you know, the only full-dressed girl in the company — and June McKee. She leads the chorus in a couple of numbers.”

“Are her belongings still in it?”

“They must be. Nobody’s called for them yet, as far as I know.”

“Let’s go back there,” Benson suggested.

“Listen, the show’s cooking to go on—”

“I won’t get in its way,” Benson assured him.

They came out of the office, went down a side aisle skirting the orchestra, with scattered spectators already lounging here and there. A seven-year-old talking picture, with Morse Code dots and dashes running up it all the time, was clouding the screen at the moment. They climbed onto the stage at the side, went in behind the screen, through the wings, and down a short, damp, feebly lighted passage, humming with feminine voices coming from behind doors that kept opening and closing as girls came in from the alley at the other end of the passage, in twos and threes.

The manager thumped one of the doors, turned the knob, and opened it with one and the same gesture — and a perfect indifference to the consequences. “Put on something, kids. There’s a detective coming in.”

“What’s the matter, isn’t he over twenty-one?” one of them jeered.

The manager stood aside to let Benson pass, then went back along the passageway toward his office with the warning: “Don’t gum them up now. This show hits fast once it gets going.”

There were two girls in there, working away at opposite ends of a three-paneled mirror. The middle space and chair were vacant. Benson’s face appeared in all three of the mirrors at once, as he came in and closed the door after him. One girl clutched at a wrapper, flung it around her shoulders. The other calmly went ahead applying make-up, leaving her undraped backbone exposed to view down to her waist.

“You two have been sharing the same dressing room with Annie Willis,” he said. “Did she usually leave this shiny junk on between shows, or take it off each time?”

The chorus leader, the one the manager had called June McKee, answered, in high-pitched derogation at such denseness. “Whadd’ye think, she could go out and cat between show’s with her face all gold like that? She woulda had a crowd following her along the street! Sure she took it off.”

They looked at one another with a sudden flash of enlightened curiosity. The McKee girl, a strawberry blonde, turned around toward him. “Sa-ay, is that what killed her, that gold stuff?” she asked in a husky whisper.

Benson overrode that. “Did she take it off yesterday or did she leave it on?”

“She left it on.” She turned to her bench mate, the brunette ballad singer, for corroboration. “Didn’t she, Vilma? Remember?”

“Where is this gold stuff? I’d like to see it.”

“It must be here with the rest of her stuff.” The McKee girl reached over, pulled out the middle of the three table drawers, left it open for him to help himself. “Look in there.” It was in pulverized form, in a small jar. It had a greenish tinge to it that way. He read the label. It was put up by a reputable cosmetic manufacturing company. There were directions for application and removal, and then an explicit warning: “Do not allow to remain on any longer than necessary after each performance.” She must have read that a dozen times in the course of using the stuff. She couldn’t have failed to see it.

“You say she left it on yesterday. Why? Have you any idea?”

Again it was the McKee girl who answered, spading her palms at him. “Because she mislaid the cleanser, the stuff that came with it to remove it. They both come together. You can’t buy one without the other. It’s a special preparation that sort of curls it up and peels it off clean and even. Nothing else works as well or as quick. You can’t use cold cream, and even alcohol isn’t much good. You can scrub your head off and it just makes a mess of your skin—”

“And yesterday it disappeared?”

“Right after the finale, she started to holler: ‘Who took my paint remover? Anybody seen my paint remover?’ Well, between the three of us, we turned the room inside out, and no sign of it. She emptied her whole drawer out. Everything else was there but that. She even went into a couple of the other dressing rooms to find out if anybody had it in there. I told her nobody else would want it. She was the only one in the company who used that gilt junk. It wouldn’t have been any good to anyone else. It never turned up.”

“Finish telling me.”

“Finally Vilma and me had to go out and eat. Time was getting short. Other nights, the three of us always ate together. We told her if she found it in time to hurry up after us. We’d keep a place for her at our table. She never showed up. When we got back for the night show, sure enough, she was still in her electroplating. She told us she’d had to send Jimmy the handyman out for something and had eaten right in the dressing room.”

Benson cocked his head slightly, as when one looks downward into a narrow space. “Are you sure this bottle of remover couldn’t have been in the drawer and she missed seeing it?”

“That was the first place we cased. We had everything out. I remember holding it up in my hand empty and thumping the bottom of it just for luck!”

His wrist shot out of his cuff, hitched back into it again, like some sort of a hydraulic brake. “Then what’s it doing in there now?” He was holding a small bottle, mate to the first, except that its contents were liquid and there was a small sponge attached to its neck.

It got quiet in the dressing room, deathly quiet. So quiet you could even hear the sound track from the screen out front.

It got quiet in the dressing-room, deathly quiet. So quiet you could even hear the sound track from the screen out front: “This is Ed Torgerson bringing you latest camera highlights from the sport news of the day.”

They both had such frightened looks on their faces, the superstitious fright of two giddy, thoughtless creatures who have suddenly come face to face with nameless evil.

The McKee girl’s lower lip was trembling with awe. “It was put back — after! Somebody wanted her to die like that! With us right here in the same room with her!” She took a deep breath, threw open her own drawer, and with a defiant look at Benson, as if to say, “Try and stop me,” tilted a small, flat gin bottle to her mouth.

The ballet singer, Vilma Lyons, suddenly dropped her head into her folded arms on the littered dressing table and began to sob.

The stage manager bopped a fist on the door and called in: “The customers are waiting to see your operations. If that dick’s still questioning you in there, tell him to put on a girdle and follow you out on the runway!”

III

“Yes, sir, boss, I’m Jimmy, the handyman.” He put down his bucket, followed Benson out into the alley, where they wouldn’t be in the way of the girls hustling in and out on quick changes. “Yes, sir, Miss Gilda sent me out last night between shows to try to get her another bottle of that there stuff, which took off the gold paint.”

“Why didn’t you get it?”

“I couldn’t! I went to the big theatrical drugstore on Eighth where she told me. It’s the only place around here where you can get it and even there they don’t keep much on hand, never get much call for it. The drugstore man told me somebody else just beat me to it. He told me he just got through selling the last bottle he had in stock, before I got there.”

“Keep on,” Benson said curtly.

“That’s about all. The drugstore man promised to order another bottle for her right away from his company’s warehouse or the wholesaler that puts it up, and see that it’s in first thing in the morning. So I went back and told her. Then she sent me across the street to the cafeteria to bring her a sandwich. When I came back the second time, she was sitting there acting kind of low, holding her head. She said, ‘Jimmy, I’m sorry I ordered that bite, after all. I don’t feel well. I hope nothing happens to me from leaving this stuff on too long.’ ”

All Benson said was: “You come along and point out that druggist to me.”

“Come in, Benson.”

“Lieutenant, I’ve got a problem. I’ve got a report here from Jacobson that I haven’t turned in to you yet. I’ve been keeping it until I know what to do about it.”

“What’s the hitch?”

“Lieutenant, is there such a thing as a negative murder? By that I mean, when not a finger is lifted against the victim, not a hair of her head is actually touched. But the murder is accomplished by withholding something, so that death is caused by an absence or lack.”

The lieutenant was quick on the trigger. “Certainly! If a man locks another man up in a room, and withholds food from him until the guy has starved to death, you’d call that murder, wouldn’t you? Even though the guy that caused his death never touched him with a ten-foot pole, never stepped in past the locked door at all.”

Benson plucked doubtfully at the cord of skin between his throat and chin. “But what do you do when you have no proof of intention? I mean, when you’ve got evidence that the act of withholding or removal was committed, but no proof that the intention was murderous. And how you gonna get proof of intention, anyway? It’s something inside the mind, isn’t it?”

The lieutenant glowered, said: “What do you do? I’ll tell you what you do. You bring your bird in and you keep him until you get the intention out of his mind and down in typewriting! That’s what you do!”

The man was alone when he started down the three flights of stairs in the shoddy walk-up apartment on West 135th. He was still alone when he got down to the bottom of them. And then somehow, between the foot of the stairs and the street door, he wasn’t alone any more. Benson was walking along beside him, as soundlessly as though his own shadow had crept forward and overtaken him along the poorly lit passage.

He shied sideways and came to a dead stop against the wall, the apparition was so unexpected.

Benson said quietly: “Come on, what’re you stopping for? You were leaving the house, weren’t you, Willis? Well, you’re still leaving the house, what’s the difference?”

They walked on as far as the street entrance. Benson just kept one fingertip touching the other’s elbow, in a sort of mockery of guidance. Willis said, “What am I pinched for?”

“Who said you were pinched? Do you know of anything you should be pinched for?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Then you’re not pinched. Simple enough, isn’t it?”

Willis didn’t say another word after that. Benson only said two things more himself, one to his charge, the other to a cab driver. He remarked: “Come on, we’ll ride it. I’m no piker.” And when a cab had sidled up to his signal, he named a precinct police station. They rode the whole way in stony silence, Willis staring straight ahead in morbid reverie, Benson with his eyes toward the cab window — but on the shadowy reflection of Willis’s face given back by the glass, not the street outside.

They got out and Benson took him in and left him waiting in a room at the back for a few minutes, while he went off to attend to something else. This wasn’t accidental; it was the psychological build-up — or rather, breakdown — preceding the grill. It had been known to work wonders.

It didn’t this time.

Benson wiped off his smirched belt buckle on a piece of waste, ran the strap of it through the loops of his trousers, refastened it. “Take him out,” he said to the subordinate who had been lending him a hand — or rather a fist.

Willis went out on his own feet, waveringly, leaning lopsided against his escort, but on his own feet. A sense of innocence can sometimes lend one moral support. But so can a sense of having outwitted justice.

“The guy must be innocent,” the other dick remarked when he had come back.

“He knows we can’t get him. There’s nothing further in his actions to be uncovered, don’t you see? We’ve got everything there is to get on him, and it isn’t enough. And we can’t get at his intentions. They got to come out through his own mouth. All he has to do is hold out. And he’ll hold out until we kill him first, if he has to. It’s easy to keep a single, simple idea like that in your mind, even when your head is bouncing back from the four walls like a punching bag.

“What breaks down most of them is the uncertainty of something they did wrong, something they didn’t cover up right, cropping up and tripping them — an exploded alibi, a surprise identification by a material witness. He had none of that uncertainty to buck. All he had to do was sit tight inside his own skin.” He held his knuckles under the filter-tap in the corner, let a little water trickle over the abrasions.

To his lieutenant, the next day, he said: “I’m morally certain he killed her. What are the three things that count in every crime? Motive, opportunity and method. He rings the bell on each count. Motive? Well, the oldest one in the world between men and women. He was sick of her; he’d lost his head about some one else, and didn’t know how else to get rid of her. She was in the way in more than just one sense. She was a deterrent, because of the other woman’s sense of loyalty. It wouldn’t have done any good if he walked out on her or divorced her; the other woman wouldn’t have had him unless he was free, and he knew it.

“It so happens the other woman was a lifelong friend of the wife. She even lived with them, up at the 135th Street place, for a while after they were first married. Then she got out, maybe because she realized a set-up like that was only asking for trouble.”

“Have you found out who this other woman is?”

“Certainly. Vilma Lyons, the ballad singer in the same show with the wife. I went up to the theater yesterday afternoon. I questioned the two girls who shared Annie Willis’s dressing room with her. One of them talked a blue streak. The other one didn’t open her mouth; I don’t recall her making a single remark during the entire interview. She was too busy thinking back. She knew; her intuition must have already told her who had done it. At the end, she suddenly buried her face in her arms and cried. I didn’t say a word. I let her take her own time. I let her think it over. I knew she’d come to me of her own accord sooner or later. She did, after curtain time last night, down here at the station house. Weren’t we going to get the person who had done that to her friend, she wanted to know? Wasn’t he going to be punished for it? Was he going to get away with it scot-free?”

“Did she accuse him?”

“She had nothing to accuse him of. He hadn’t said anything to her. He hadn’t even shown her by the look on his face. And then little by little I caught on, by reading between the lines of what she said, that he’d liked her a little too well.”

He shrugged. “She can’t help us — she admitted it herself. Because he started giving her these long, haunting looks when he thought she wasn’t noticing, and acting discontented and restless, that isn’t evidence he killed his wife. But she knows, in her own mind, just as I know in mine, who hid that remover from Annie Willis, and with what object, and why. She hates him like poison now. I could read it on her face. He’s taken her friend from her. They’d chummed together since they were both in pigtails, at the same orphanage.”

“All right. What about Opportunity, your second factor?”

“He rings the bell there, too. And again it doesn’t do us any good. Sure, he admits he was sitting out front at the matinee day before yesterday. But so was he a dozen times before. Sure, he admits he went backstage to her dressing room, after she’d gone back to it alone and while the other two were still onstage. But so had he a dozen times before. He claims it was already missing then. She told him so, and asked him to go out and get her another bottle. But who’s to prove that? She’s not alive, and neither of the two other girls had come off the stage yet.”

“Well, what happened to the second bottle that would have saved her life?”

“He paid for it. The clerk wrapped it for him. He started out holding it in his hand. And at the drug store entrance he collided with someone coming in. It was jarred out of his hand and shattered on the floor!”

And as if he could sense what the lieutenant was going to say, he hurriedly added: “There were witnesses galore to the incident; the clerk himself, the soda jerk, the cashier. I questioned every one of them. Not one could say for sure that it wasn’t a genuine accident. Not one could swear that he’d seen Willis actually relax his hand and let it fall, or deliberately get in this other party’s way.”

“Then why didn’t he go back and tell her? Why did he leave her there like that with this stuff killing her, so that she had to send the handyman out to see if he could get hold of any for her?”

“We can’t get anything on him for that, either. He did the natural thing; he went scouting around for it in other places — the way a man would, who was ashamed to come back and tell her he’d just smashed the one bottle they had left in stock.” And through thinned lips he added acidly, “Everything he did was so natural. That’s why we can’t get him!”

The lieutenant said, “There’s an important little point in that smashed-bottle angle. Did he know it was the last bottle on hand before he dropped it, or did he only find out after he stepped back to the counter and tried to get another?”

Benson nodded. “I bore down heavy on that with the drug clerk. Unless Willis was deaf, dumb, and blind, he knew that that was the last bottle in the store before he started away from the counter with it. The clerk not only had a hard time finding it, but when lie finally located it, he remarked, ‘This is the last one we’ve got left.’ ”

“Then that accident was no accident.”

“Can you prove it?” was all Benson said.

The lieutenant answered that by discarding it. “Go ahead,” he said sourly.

“I checked with every one of the other places he told me he’d been to after leaving there, and he had asked for it in each one. They corroborated him. He wasn’t in much danger of coming across it anywhere else and he knew it! The drug clerk had not only forewarned him that he didn’t think he’d find it anywhere else, but his wife must have told him the same thing before she sent him out.” And screwing his mouth up, Benson said, “But it looked good for the record, and it kept him away from the theater — while she was dying by inches from cellular asphyxiation, without knowing it!”

“Didn’t he go back at all? Did he stay out from then on?”

“No one saw him come back, not a soul. I made sure of that before I put it up to him.” Benson smiled bleakly. “I know what you’re thinking, and I thought of that, too. If he didn’t go back at all, then he wasn’t responsible for making the remover disappear in the first place. Because it was back in the drawer before the next matinee, I found it there myself. Now get the point involved.

“He had a choice between the natural thing and the completely exonerating thing. But the exonerating thing would have meant behaving a little oddly. The natural thing for a man sent out on an errand by his wife is to return eventually, even if it’s an hour later, even if it’s only to report that he was unsuccessful. The exonerating thing, in this case, was for him to stay out for good. All he had to do was claim he never went back, and he was absolutely in the clear, absolutely eliminated.”

“Well?” The lieutenant could hardly wait for the answer.

“He played it straight all the way through. He admitted, of his own accord and without having been seen by anybody, that he stopped back for a minute to tell her he hadn’t been able to get it, after chasing all over the Forties for the stuff. And that, of course, is when the missing bottle got back into the drawer.”

The lieutenant was almost goggle-eyed. “Well I’ll be—! She was still alive, the murder hadn’t even been completed yet, and he was already removing the traces of it by replacing the bottle!”

“The timing of her act guaranteed that she was already as good as dead, even with the bottle back within her reach. She couldn’t take the gilt off now for another three hours. Using it continuously had already lowered her resistance. That brief breathing spell she should have had between shows spelled the difference between life and death.

“In other words, Lieutenant, he left her alive, with fifty people around her who talked to her, rubbed shoulders with her in the wings, after he’d gone. And later she even danced onstage before a couple hundred more. But he’d already murdered her!”

“But you say he didn’t have to admit he stopped back at the theater, and yet he did.”

“Sure, but to me that doesn’t prove his innocence, that only proves his guilt and infernal cleverness. By avoiding the slightest lie, the slightest deviation in his account of his actual movements, he’s much safer than by grasping at a chance of automatic, complete vindication. Somebody just might have seen him come back; he couldn’t be sure.”

He took a deep breath. “There it all is, Lieutenant: motive, opportunity, and method. And it don’t do us much good, does it? There isn’t any more evidence to be had. There never will be. There’s nothing more to uncover — because it all is uncovered already. We couldn’t get him on a disorderly conduct charge on all of it put together, much less for murder. What do I do with him now?”

The lieutenant took a long time answering, as though he hated to have to. Finally he did. “We’ll have to turn him loose; we can’t hold him indefinitely.”

“Gee, I hate to see him walk out of here free,” Benson said.

“There’s no use busting your brains about it. It’s a freak that only happens maybe once in a thousand times — but it happened this time.”

Later that same morning Benson walked out to the entrance of the precinct house with Willis, after the formalities of release had been gone through. Willis had a lot of court-plaster here and there, but he was free again. That was what mattered. Court-plaster wears off after awhile; several thousand volts of electricity does not.

“Well, I guess you think you’re pretty mart,” Benson said taciturnly.

Willis said: “That’s the word for people that have held out something, getting away with it. I got a beating for something I didn’t do. Unlucky is the word for me, not smart.”

Benson stopped short at the top of the entrance steps, marking the end of his authority. He smiled. “Well, if we couldn’t get anything out of you in there last night, I didn’t expect to get anything out of you out here right now.” His mouth thinned. “Here’s the street. Beat it.”

Willis went down the steps, walked on a short distance alone and unhindered. Then he decided to cross over to the opposite side of the street. When he had reached it, he stopped a minute and looked back.

Benson was still standing there on the police-station steps, looking after him. Their stares met. Benson couldn’t read his look, whether it conveyed mockery or relief or just casual indifference. But for that matter, Willis couldn’t read Benson’s either; whether it conveyed regret or philosophic acceptance of defeat or held a vague promise that things between them weren’t over yet. And it wasn’t because of the sizable distance that separated them, either; it was because the thoughts of both of them were locked up in their minds.

There was a brittle quality of long-smoldering rancor about her, even when she first opened the door, even before she’d had time to see who was standing there. She must have just got home from the show. She still had her coat and hat on. But she was already holding a little jigger glass of colorless liquid between two of her fingers, as if trying to cauterize the inner resentment that was continually gnawing at her. Her eyes traveled over his form from head to foot and back again.

“Been letting any more killers go since I saw you last?” she said sultrily.

“You’ve taken that pretty much to heart, haven’t you?” Benson answered levelly.

“Why wouldn’t I? Her ghost powders its nose on the bench next to me twice a day! A couple performances ago I caught myself turning around and saying: ‘Did you get paid this week—’ before I stopped to think.” She emptied the jigger. “And do you know what keeps the soreness from healing? Because the person that did it is still around, untouched, unpunished. Because he got away with it. You know who I mean or do I have to break out with a name?”

“You can’t prove it, any more than we could, so why bring up a name?”

“Prove it! Prove it! You make me sick.” She refilled the jigger. “You’re the police! Why weren’t you able to get him?”

“You talk like a fool,” he said patiently. “You talk like we let him go purposely. D’you think I enjoyed watching him walk out scot-free under my nose? And that ain’t all. I’ve been passed over on the promotion list, on account of it. They didn’t say it was that; they didn’t say it was anything. They didn’t have to. I can figure it out for myself. It’s the first blank I’ve drawn in six years. It’s eating at my insides, too, like yours.”

She relented at the sign of a bitterness that matched her own. “Misery likes company, I guess. Come on in, as long as you’re here. Have a stab,” she said grudgingly, and pushed the gin slightly toward him.

They sat in brooding silence for several minutes, two frustrated people. Finally she spoke again. “He had the nerve to put his flowers on her grave! Imagine, flowers from the killer to the one he killed! I found them there when I went there myself, before the matinee today, to leave some roses of my own. The caretaker told me whose they were. I tore them in a thousand pieces when he wasn’t looking.”

“I know,” he said. “He goes up twice a week, leaves fresh flowers each time. I’ve been casing him night and day. The hypocritical rat! All the way through from the beginning, he’s done the natural thing. He does it whether he thinks anyone’s watching or not, and that’s the safe way for him to do it.”

He refilled his own jigger without asking permission. He laughed harshly. “But he’s already found a refill, just the same. He’s not pining away. I cased his flat while he was out today, and I found enough evidence to show there’s some blonde been hanging around to console him. Gilt hairpins on the kitchen floor, a double set of dirty dishes — two of everything — in the sink. He’s probably just waiting for the temperature to go down enough, before he hooks up with her.”

She lidded her eyes, touched a hand to her own jet-black hair. “I’m not surprised,” she said huskily. “That would be about his speed.” She got up suddenly. “These jiggers are too small.” She came back with a tumbler, a third full. “Maybe you can still get something on him through her,” she suggested balefully.

He shook his head. “He can go around with ten blondes if he feels like it. He’s within his rights. We can’t hold him just for that alone—”

“What’s the matter with the laws these days?” she said almost savagely. “Here we are, you and I, sitting here in this room. We both know he killed Annie Willis. You’re drawing pay from the police department, and he’s moving around immune and fancy-free only a few blocks away from us at this very minute!”

He nodded as though he agreed with her. “They fail you every once in awhile,” he admitted gloomily, “the statutes as they are written down on the books. They slip a cog and let someone fall through—” Then he went on: “But there’s an older law than the statutes we work under. I don’t know if you ever heard of it or not. It’s called the Mosaic Law. ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ And when the modern set-up goes back on you, that one never docs. It’s short and sweet, got no amendments, dodges or habeas corpuses to clutter it up. ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ ”

“I like the way that sounds better,” she said.

“You’re getting a little lit. I shouldn’t be talking like this.”

“I’m not getting lit. I understand every word you say. But more important still, I hear the words you’re not saying.”

He just looked at her, and she looked at him. They were like two fencers, warily circling around each other to find an opening. She got up, moved over to the window, stared grimly out toward the traffic intersection at the corner ahead. “Green light,” she reported. Then she turned toward him with a bitter, puckered smile. “Green light. That means go ahead — doesn’t it?”

“Green light,” he murmured. “That means go ahead — if you care to.” The gin was making him talk a little more freely, although that was the only sign of it he showed. “The man that throws the switch in the deathhouse at Sing Sing, what makes him a legal executioner and not a murderer? The modern statutes. The Mosaic Code can have its legal executioners, too, who are not just murderers.”

She had come over close to him again.

“But never,” he went on, looking straight up at her, “exceed or distort its short, simple tenet. Never repay the gun with the knife, or the knife with the club. Then that’s murder, not the Mosaic Code any more. In the same way, if the State executioner shot the condemned man on his way to the chair, or poisoned him in his cell, then he wouldn’t be a legal executioner any more, he’d be just a murderer himself.” And he repeated it again for her slowly. “ ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ Annie Willis met her death by having something withheld from her that her safety required. No weapon was used on Annie Willis, remember.”

“Yes,” she said with flaming dreaminess. “And I know where there’s a trunk that belongs to me, down in a basement storage room, seldom entered, seldom used. One of these big, thick theatrical trunks, roomy enough to carry around the props for a whole act. I left it behind when I moved out. I was going to send for it but—” She didn’t finish it.

He looked down at his empty jigger, as if he was listening intently to her, but without looking at her.

“And if I came to you, for instance, and said: ‘What’s been bothering you and me both has been taken care of,’ how would you receive me — as a criminal under the modern law or a legal executioner under the old one?”

He looked straight up at her with piercing directness. “The modern law failed you and me, didn’t it? Then what right would I have to judge you by it?”

She murmured half audibly, as if endeavoring to try him out: “Then why not you? Why me?”

“The injury was done to you, not me. A friend is a personal belonging, a professional disappointment isn’t. Nothing was done to me personally. Under the Mosaic Law, a frustrated job can only be repaid by another frustrated job, by making the person who injured you suffer a like disappointment in his work.”

She laughed dangerously. “I can do better than that,” she said softly.

She kept shaking her head, looking at him from time to time as if she still found the situation almost past belief. “The strangest things never get down on the record books! They wouldn’t be believed if they did! Here you are, sitting in my room, a man drawing pay from the police department, with a shield in your pocket at this very minute—” She didn’t finish it.

“I’m a little bit tight on your gin,” he said, getting up, “and we haven’t been talking.”

She held the door open for him. “No,” she smiled, “we haven’t been talking. You weren’t here tonight, and nothing was said. But perfect understanding doesn’t need words. I’ll probably see you again to let you know how — what we haven’t been talking about is coming along.”

The door closed and First Grade Detective Benson went down the stairs with an impassive face.

What followed was even more incredible yet. Or, at least, the surroundings it occurred in were. A cop came in to him, at the precinct house three nights later, said: “There’s a lady out there asking for you, Benson. Won’t state her business.”

Benson said: “I think I know who you mean. Look, Corrigan, you know that little end room on the left, at the back of the hall? Is there anyone in there right now?”

The cop said: “Naw, there’s never anyone in there.”

“Take her back there, will you? I’ll be back there.”

He got there first. She stood outlined in the open doorway first, watching the cop return along the hall to where he’d come from, before she’d come in.

He didn’t pretend to be preoccupied going over papers or anything like that, possibly because there were none to be found in there. It was one of those blind spots that even the most bustling, overcrowded buildings occasionally develop, unused, avoided the greater part of the time by the personnel. He acted slightly frightened. Perhaps startled, taken aback by her unexpected effrontery, would be a better word. He kept pacing nervously back and forth, waiting for her to come in.

When she finally turned away from seeing the cop off, she came in and closed the door after her. He said: “Couldn’t you have waited until I dropped over to see you?”

“How did I know when you’d be around again? I felt like I couldn’t wait another half hour to get it off my chest.” There was something almost gloating in the way she looked around her. “Is it safe to talk here?”

“Sure, if you keep your voice down.” He went over to the door, opened it, looked along the passageway outside, closed it again. “It’s all right.”

She said, half-mockingly, with that intimacy of one conspirator for another: “No dictaphones around?”

He was too on edge to share her bantering mood. “Don’t be stupid,” he snapped. “How did I know you were going to pull a raw stunt like this? This is the last place I ever expected you to—”

She lit a cigarette, preened herself. “You think you’re looking at a cheap ballad singer on a burlesque circuit, don’t you?”

“What am I looking at, then?”

“You’re looking at a legal executioner, under the Mosaic Code. I have a case of Biblical justice to report. I had a friend I valued very highly, and she was caused to die by having the skin of her body deprived of air. Now the man who did that to her is going to die sometime during the night, if he hasn’t already, by having the skin of his body — and his lungs and his heart — deprived of air in the same way.”

He lit a cigarette to match hers. His hands were so steady — too steady, rigid almost — that you could tell they weren’t really. He was forcing them to be that way. His color was paler than it had been when he first came in.

“What have you got to say to that?” She clasped her own sides in a parody of macabre delight.

“I’ll tell you in a minute.” He went over to the door, opened it and looked out again, as if to make sure there was no one out there to overhear. He’d dropped his cigarette on the way over to it.

She misunderstood. “Don’t be so jittery—” she began scornfully.

He’d raised his voice suddenly, before she knew what to expect. It went booming down the desolate hallway. “Corrigan! C’mere a minute!” A blue-suited figure had joined his in the opening before she knew what was happening. He pointed in toward her.

“Arrest this woman for murder! Hold her here in this room until I get back! I’m making you personally responsible for her!”

A bleat of smothered fury ripped from her. “Why, you dirty, doublecrossing— The guy ain’t even dead yet—”

“I’m not arresting you for the murder of Frank Willis. I’m arresting you for the murder of his wife, Annie Willis, over a month and a half ago at the New Rotterdam Theater!”

The greater part of it came winging back from the far end of the hallway, along which he was moving fast on his way to try to save a man’s life.

They came trooping down single file, fast, into the gloom. White poker chips of light glanced off the damp, cemented brick walls from their torches. The janitor was in the lead. He poked at a switch by his sense of memory alone, and a feeble parody of electricity illuminated part of the ceiling and the floor immediately under it, nothing else.

“I ain’t seen him since yesterday at noon,” he told them in a frightened voice. “I seen him going out then. That was the last I seen of him. Here it is over here, gents. This door.”

They fanned out around it in a half-circle. All the separate poker chips of torchlight, came to a head in one big wagon wheel on it. It was fireproof; nail-studded iron, rusty but stout. But it was fastened simply by a padlock clasping two thick staples.

“I remember now, my wife said something about his asking her for the key to here, earlier in the evening while I was out,” the janitor said. “So he was still all right then.”

“Yes, he was still all right then,” Benson agreed shortly. “Get that thing. Hurry up!” A crowbar was inserted behind the padlock chain: two of the men with him got on one end of it and started to pry. Something snapped. The unopened lock bounced up, and they swung the storage-space door out with a grating sound.

The torch-beams converged inside and lit it up. It was small and cramped. The air was already musty and unfit to breathe — even the unconfined air at large between its four sides — and it was lifeless. All the discarded paraphernalia of forgotten tenants over the years choked it. Cartons, empty packing cases, a dismantled iron bed frame, even a kid’s sled with one runner missing. But there was a clear space left between the entrance and the one large trunk that loomed up in it, like a towering headstone on a tomb.

It stood there silent, inscrutable. On the floor before it lay, in eloquent meaning, a single large lump of coal brought from the outside part of the basement and discarded after it had served its purpose. Two smaller fragments had chipped off it, lay close by.

“A blow on the head with that would daze anyone long enough to—” Benson scuffed it out of the way with his foot. “Hurry up, fellows. She’d only just left here when she looked me up. It’s not a full hour vet. The seams may be warped with age, there’s still a slim chance—”

They pushed the scared, white-lipped janitor back out of their way. Axe blades began to slash around the rusted snaplock. “Not too deep,” Benson warned. “Give it flat strokes from the side, or you’re liable to cut in and — Got that pulmotor ready?”

The axes held off at his signal and he pulled the dangling lock off the splintered seams with his bare hands. They all jumped in, began pulling in opposite directions. The trunk split open vertically. A face stared sightlessly into the focused torchbeams, a contorted mask of strangulation and unconsciousness that had been pressed despairingly up against the seam as close as it could go, to drink in the last precious molecule or two of air.

Willis’ body, looking shrunken, tumbled out into their arms. They carried him out into the more open part of the basement, one hand that ended in mangled nails trailing inertly after him. An oxygen tank was hooked up, and a silent, grim struggle for life began in the eerie light of the shadowy basement.

Twice, they wanted to quit, and Benson wouldn’t let them. “If he goes, that makes a murderer out of me! And I won’t be made a murderer out of! We’re going to bring him back, if we stay here until tomorrow night!”

And then in the middle of the interminable silence, a simple, quiet announcement from the man in charge of the squad: “He’s back, Benson. He’s going again!”

Somebody let out a long, whistling breath of relief. It was a detective who had just escaped being made into a murderer.

At the hospital later, in the early hours of the morning, when he was able to talk again, Willis told him the little there was to tell.

“She showed up and said she wanted to get something out of that trunk she’d left behind here in our care, when she’d moved away. I got the key to the storage room from the janitor’s wife. I should have tumbled she had something up her sleeve when she asked me not to mention who it was for. Let them think I wanted it for myself. Then she got me to go down there with her by pretending there were some things of Annie’s in the trunk, from their days in show business together, that she wanted to give back to me.

“I didn’t open my mouth to her, didn’t say a word. I was afraid to trust myself, afraid if I came out with what was on my mind. I’d beat her half-senseless and only get in more trouble with you police guys. I couldn’t wait to get rid of her, to see the last of her —

“I even helped her to open the trunk, because it was pretty heavy to handle. Then she asked me to bend down and see if I could reach something that was all the way down at the bottom of one of the two halves, and I stepped between them like a fool.

“Something that felt like a big rock hit the back of my head, and before my senses had a chance to clear, the two sides had swung closed on me like a—” He shuddered. “Like a coffin when you’re still alive.” He swung one finger-bandaged paw in front of his eyes to shut out the recollection. “The rest was pretty awful.”

The lieutenant came in, holding the confession in his hands. Benson followed.

“She put away?”

“Yes, sir.”

The lieutenant went ahead, reading the confession. Benson waited in silence until he’d finished. The lieutenant looked up finally. “This’ll do. It’s strong enough to hold her on, anyway. You got results, but I don’t get the technique. What was this business of her coming here and confiding in you that she’d made an attempt on Willis’ life tonight, and how does that tie in with the murder of Annie Willis? You hit the nail on the head. This confession proves that, but I don’t follow your line of reasoning. I miss the connecting links.”

Benson said: “Here was the original equation. A wife in the middle, a man and a woman on the ends. She was in the way, but of which one of them? Vilma Lyons claimed it was Willis who had a pash on her. Willis didn’t claim anything; the man as a rule won’t.

“I watched them to see which would approach the other. Neither one did. The innocent party, because he had never cared in the first place; the guilty, because he or she had a guilty conscience, was not only afraid they were being watched by us, but also that the other might catch on in some way, connect the wife’s death with him or her, if they made a move too soon after.

“But still I couldn’t tell which was which — although my money was still on Willis, up to the very end.

“Here was the technique. When I saw neither of them was going to tip a hand, I tipped it, instead. There’s nothing like a shot of good, scalding jealousy in the arm for tipping the hand. I went to both of them alike, gave them the same buildup treatment. I was bitter and sore, because I’d muffed the job. It was a mark against me on my record, and so on. In Willis’ case, because we’d already held him for it once. I had to vary it a little, make him think I’d changed my mind, now thought it was Vilma, but couldn’t get her for it.

“In other words, I gave them both the same unofficial all-clear to go ahead and exact retribution personally. And I lit the same spark to both their fuses. I told Willis that Vilma had taken up with some other guy; I told her he had taken up with some other girl.

“One fuse fizzled out. The other flared and exploded. One of them didn’t give a damn, because he never had. The other, having already committed murder to gain the object of her affections, saw red, would have rather seen him dead than have somebody else get him.

“You see, Lieutenant, murder always comes easier the second time than the first. Given equal provocation, whichever one of those two had committed the murder the first time, I felt wouldn’t hesitate to commit it a second time. The one that hadn’t, probably couldn’t be incited to contemplate it, no matter what the circumstances. Willis had loved his wife. He smoldered with hate when I told him we had evidence Vilma had killed her, but he didn’t act on the hints I gave him. It never occurred to him to.

“Only one took advantage of the leeway I seemed to be giving them, and went ahead. That one was the real murderer. Having murdered once, she didn’t stop at murder a second time.

“It’s true,” he conceded, “that that’s not evidence that would have done us very much good by itself, in trying to prove the other case. But what it did manage to do was make a dent in the murderer’s armor. All we had to do was keep hacking away and she finally crumbled. Being caught in the act, the second time weakened her self-confidence in her immunity for what she’d done the first time, gave us a psychological upper-hand over her, and she finally came through.” He indicated the confession.

“Well,” pondered the lieutenant, stroking his chin, “it’s not a technique that I’d care to have you men make a habit of using very frequently. In fact, it’s a damn dangerous one to monkey around with, but it got results this time, and that’s the proof of any pudding.”

Afterword to “The Fatal Footlights”

“The Fatal Footlights” (Detective Fiction Weekly, June 14, 1941) seems to have been intended for Woolrich’s New York Landmarks series, and for a recluse he captures remarkably well the tawdry glitter of a cheap 42nd Street burlesque house. The early scenes set the stage and lead up to the discovery of the means of Gilda’s death, which is as bizarre as anything in the Woolrich canon of weird murder methods; but then the homicide detective Benson morphs into a psychotic sadist and the story into one of the most chilling of Woolrich’s Noir Cop thrillers. The murder-by-gilding gimmick seems somehow to have come to the attention of Ian Fleming, who used it almost twenty years later in his classic James Bond novel Goldfinger (1959).